Thursday, February 9, 2017

Always Be Yourself, Unless You Can Be Batman

The audience in my theater laughed heartily at all the jokes, even the ones that were only... well, I don't want to say, only pretty funny, because every single joke hits it out of the park, the entire first 15 minutes are just a solid wall of hilarity, and none of the jokes you think are going to get old actually go on long enough for them to get old... but, I mean, not all the jokes are, hearty laugh funny. Audiences are weird, I guess. I think I'm the only one who laughed at some of the jokes that others, must've missed I guess; it happened a couple of times but the one I can remember for sure was at the beginning where these guards were loading their stun guns and were all, "non-lethal!" (I think the other joke had something to do with some obscure bit of batcanon they slipped a subtle gag in about.)

The way the plot is laid out is pretty amazing- when the stuff happens, and then the other stuff, I was like, this is moving too quickly, the resolution is going to turn out to be really unsatisfying, but I didn't foresee the part with the stuff, and then the other stuff happening. Um, sorry, spoilers (there are about a grazillion plot points not in any of the trailers, so I'm just alluding very very very vaguely to them.) The first LEGO movie I also had a moment of doubt like that too, where it was all, is this story actually going anywhere but it turns out it was, so let me just compare what I'm talking about to the Cloud Cuckooland scene in the LEGO movie, combined with how Enchantress and Incubus take over Midway City just way too easily in Suicide Squad, only with the LEGO Movie resolution that makes the overtaking of the city perfectly paced instead of the Suicide Squad resolution that reveals that the plotting really is a mess (I still kinda liked that movie, but, yeah, I don't think anyone can disagree, the pacing was totally schizoid.)

This movie does just as good a job at deconstructing the idea of Batman that the first LEGO movie did deconstructing the idea of LEGO. It's a pretty weird concept for a movie, if you think about it. Like, if you had no idea what either LEGO or Batman are, this film would be, just, I mean you'd have zero context to put anything into... it's a memorable, imaginative movie, but it'd be even moreso if it made no sense.

Zootopia watch? Jenny "Bellwether" Slate as Harley Quinn. The word "jazzed" (as in, "the Mammal Inclusion Initiative is really starting to pay off; Mayor Lionheart is going to be so jazzed") gets used several times, with a lantern hung on it each scene it happens. Dick at one point briefly says "o-m-gosh," as in Clawhauser's exclamation "o-m-goodness."

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